KMS,‭ ‬an abbreviation of Knowledge Management System,‭ ‬was a commercial second generation hypermedia system, originally created as a successor for the early hypermedia system ZOG. KMS was developed by Don McCracken and Rob Akscyn of Knowledge Systems, a 1981 spinoff from the Computer Science Department of Carnegie Mellon University.
The purpose of KMS was to let many users collaborate in creating and sharing information within large, shared hypertext, and from the very beginning, the system was designed as a true multi-user system.
As a spatial hypermedia system, KMS was intended to represent all forms of explicit 'knowledge artifacts' such as presentations, documents, databases, and software programs, as well as common forms of electronic communication.
The central element in the KMS data model is that of screen-sized pages interconnected by links. The user had the option of switching between a view of a single frame or two side-by-side half-screen views.
Frames are always fixed-size, meaning scrolling is not needed. The frame model is spatial rather than character based, so that text, graphics and images may always be placed anywhere in the frame, even overlapping one another. Another way to say this is that empty space in the frame actually denotes space, not just the absence of content. Frames being fixed in size scrolling as a form of interaction is eliminated opting instead for larger aggregates such as documents and programs to be structured as hierarchies of hypermedia nodes. This flexibility makes it possible to create a document, search, run programs from a tree of frames starting at any frame.